Behind bizarre bars with a modern bard

July 5, 2003 — 10.00am

Rusty Young28, teacher and author"In the end, I was really quite sad to be leaving [the prison] because I'd made some good friends in there."

Rusty Young is a decent, middle-class young man from Mosman. Scots College, finance/law degree and all that. So how did he end up in prison in Bolivia? Well, he took a tour and liked it so much he stayed.

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Young, now 28, was doing the backpacking thing in South America three years ago when fellow travellers began talking about a prison where one of the inmates - a convicted drug trafficker - conducted daily guided tours and dealt in cocaine.

And there it was, in the "Things To Do In La Paz" section of the Lonely Planet guide tucked at the bottom of Young's backpack: "One of the world's most bizarre tourist attractions."

The prison was el Penal de San Pedro and the tour-guide inmate was an Englishman named Thomas McFadden, who was serving six years for drug smuggling.

Young took the tour and changed his life. On meeting McFadden, Young was "mesmerised" and discovered something the guide books hadn't mentioned: that, for a small bribe, tourists could spend the night in the prison.

"Something clicked between us that night. We talked nonstop until daybreak and then I decided to stay another night. Around 4 o'clock in the morning of the following day it was decided: I was going to write his book for him," writes Young in the book that resulted.

Marching Powder chronicles McFadden's life from the day he was caught at El Alto airport carrying five kilograms of pure cocaine to the day he walked free after serving four years and eight months of his sentence.

If this had been any ordinary prison, Young would probably not be touring the world promoting this book. But San Pedro, he writes in the first chapter, is full of the "types of true stories that are so bizarre they seem like fiction". Such as the cat that was addicted to smoking cocaine, for instance. Or that families are allowed to live in the prison; that real-estate agents sell prisoners their cells; and that many inmates run small businesses, such as shops and restaurants.

It is a place where luxury lives alongside misery. And the whole thing, as was that first night when McFadden told Young his story, is "powdered with cocaine".

Back in Australia to promote his book, Young - who lives in Bogota, Colombia - explained what had attracted him to McFadden's story: "Thomas was, effectively, a modern bard. He wasn't offering any service or products - though he did sell a bit of coke - but the attraction for tourists was that he has this amazing personality, this interpersonal intelligence.

"He was able to get through to people, make them feel safe immediately they were inside the prison, and make them want to come back. There were lots of tourists who had visited the week before who were coming back - people came back two or three times, not to do the tour again but just to talk to Thomas ... he had this unique charm."

Young visited McFadden every day for four months, taping their conversations and trying to capture what life in San Pedro was like. Mostly, he felt safe, he said. "In the end, I was really quite sad to be leaving because I'd made some quite good friends in there and met some really fascinating characters. It totally turned my perception of what a prisoner would be like on its head.

"I never was physically attacked or physically threatened - I think the presence of women and children in the prison was a very pacifying influence. But there were frequent reminders that lurking in the background was an undercurrent of violence. Sometimes, you'd walk through the inside sections and see bloodstained concrete, and you'd hear that someone you knew or had met had been stabbed the previous night.

"The point when I felt most threatened was when Thomas's friend, whom the police used to take out of the prison to steal cars of a night, was found hanging in his cell. He was threatening to expose police corruption - possibly they weren't paying him enough or they hadn't paid him at all - but they made a pretty lousy job of making it look like a suicide. At that point, I think I realised it wasn't a big adventure any more. This was quite a serious thing. That was the point where I also accepted I shared some responsibility in attaining Thomas's freedom because he was taking a big risk having me in there.

"We couldn't tell any of the police, we couldn't tell any of the inmates what we were doing. Everything was being done secretly, so we had to give the impression that I was just another tourist who was in there to do drugs or whatever. I never felt the consequences would come back to me but I felt that if Thomas wasn't out and we published a book about the corruption inside the prison that his life may be in danger."

Young even went so far as to employ his law degree to masquerade as McFadden's international human rights lawyer, and was there on the day that he walked free.

After that, the unlikely pair headed off to Colombia. "His English language skills aren't really high but, given the lack of native English speakers in Colombia, he managed to get a job as an English teacher," Young said. "We lived together for three months and I helped him basically readjust to normal living, having to deal with such normal, boring things as paying the bills, paying the rent, getting up in the morning at the same time. We're still in regular contact."

How, though, did Young weigh up writing so glowingly about a drug trafficker, someone who was, as one book reviewer put it, "prepared to perpetuate misery"?

"I thought this was a story that should be told as it was told to me," he said. "Obviously, him being the narrator, he's not going to be casting any negative moral judgements on himself, but the hypocrisy of his morality comes through at certain points. And then there's the irony of him telling his story of what a fantastic, clever drug dealer he is and how he always outsmarts the police and what a cool customer he was, getting it past airport security. But, of course, he's telling me this from his prison cell.

"This was the challenge. To allow his hypocrisy to come through in the way he told his story. It was a story that had to be told through one of the prisoners' eyes and in a non-judgemental way that allows readers to make up their own minds."